Children’s Socioemotional Strengths in Early Childhood Education (ECE) and Before/After School Care (BASC): A Multilevel Ecological Analysis

<b>Background/Objectives:</b> The current study explored how trajectories of children's socioemotional strengths were explained by school, classroom, and individual differences in the context of licensed early childhood education (ECE), involving preschool and before/after school programming. The predictive role of neighbourhood socioeconomic status (SES) was also explored. <b>Methods:</b> Participants included <i>n</i> = 226 children from 39 classrooms across seven ECE centres in a large city in Canada. Educators completed measures of children's socioemotional strengths at three time points between January and June 2024. Children's forward sortation areas (FSA) were also linked with publicly available data on neighbourhood SES from the 2021 census. Four-level multilevel models estimated scores across time, individual, classroom, and school levels. <b>Results:</b> All four levels significantly explained variance in strengths. On average, child strengths improved over the 4.5 months of ECE programming. Random slopes at the individual and classroom level revealed variability in trajectories. Higher neighbourhood SES was associated with higher socioemotional strengths and was not associated with change over time. <b>Conclusions:</b> The findings of this study reveal that child, classroom, school, and neighbourhood factors interact to foster child socioemotional strengths. Thus, targeted and universal programs for promoting socioemotional development in ECE must similarly adopt a multiple levels of analysis perspective.